Dinner at Eight
Director: George Cukor
Year Released: 1933
Rating: 2.0
An elaborate dinner arrangement is planned for several NY socialites to meet a rich British couple, and the movie documents the events that take place before the meal. Although I can forgive the stagy direction by Cukor, the script is quite uneven, allowing some scenes to run well past the point where they should have been cut, and for making the John Barrymore narrative careen into melodrama where the movie - up to that point - had mostly been farce. The "characters" are basically caricatures of the performers' standard roles - J. Barrymore as a drunken womanizer, Lionel Barrymore as a capitalist, Jean Harlow a no-class gold digger - and the dialogue doesn't always have the zing of other Kaufman works.
